Missing hikers find searchers
Hours before a 40-person rescue team was set to cancel mission, pair emerge after a week in the B.C. wilderness
On a hill overlooking the vast southern B.C. wilderness, officials gathered the families of Lynne Carmody and Rick Moynan and had them take a long look at the final resting place of the people they would likely never be able to bury.
“We flew them up to a beautiful spot so that they could say their last goodbyes,” said Paul Berry with Comox Search & Rescue, one of the many groups that joined in the seven-day search for the missing couple.
But mere hours before the 40-person search team was set to pack it in and leave Moynan and Carmody to their fate, two figures emerged from the woods and approached an idling rescue helicopter.
They were dehydrated, bug-bitten and bruised from crawling through dense forest. But otherwise, Carmody and Moynan were in surprisingly good shape for two people everyone assumed was dead.
Without food, adequate clothing or survival gear of any kind, they had endured a week of searing temperatures of up to 40 C.
But when Moynan called his father soon after being whisked to hospital by helicopter, he said, “We didn’t know what all the fuss was about.”
Plenty of people go missing in British Columbia each summer but, as several of those involved noted, this search seemed odder than most.
Carmody and Moynan had deviated wildly from their reported hiking plan. After getting lost, they sheltered in a dense wooded area where they could not be seen by any of the three helicopters buzzing the area.
Most critically, the pair had no mirror with which to signal or matches to start a fire.
“We were looking right down and over the U.S. border, and anytime there was a wisp of smoke, we descended on it rapidly,” said Berry.
Moynan and Carmody had been staying at Cathedral Lakes Lodge, a place frequented by seasoned hikers.
“We’ve had people break legs and we’ve found them the next day, but we’ve never really had anybody go missing like this,” said a lodge employee.
“I honestly don’t know what they did.”
By all accounts, they should have known what they were doing. Their families said Moynan had a fair amount of outdoors experience and Carmody’s now-deceased husband had worked in search and rescue.
Before leaving the lodge, the couple — both aged about 60 — said they were heading to Glacier Lake, a simple two- kilometre journey that can take as little as 30 minutes one-way.
But they became lost after trying to detour to a nearby mountain peak and were soon kilometres away from their starting point.
“They were disoriented … lost, they didn’t know which direction to go,” said Berry.
The first sign something was wrong was when Carmody and Moynan failed to show up for dinner. The lodge sent a search party to do a quick scan of surrounding trails, but finding nothing, they alerted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Three days into the search, RCMP sources were similarly calling the disappearance “puzzling.”
“(There is) no sign of these people whatsoever, no signs left for us, no material tied to a tree … it is just kind of like they vanished,” spokesman Cpl. Dave Tyreman told Global News.
There were meadows in the search area where aircraft might have spotted lost human figures, but Moynan and Carmody stuck to the woods, where they built a temporary shelter and stayed close to a stream for water.
At higher elevations in the park, the forests are replaced by treeless alpine tundra. This means lost hikers could move to high ground to get their bearings.
“For them to actually go down and move into the trees would have been really strange to do, so we spent most of our efforts searching the alpine areas,” said Alan Hobler, another search coordinator, adding the couple might have fallen off a cliff.
On Sunday, after Moynan and Carmody had their 11thhour encounter with one of the last searches, stunned guests at the lodge saw them wander in for a quick meal before being bundled off to hospital.
“Hikers Lynne Carmody and Rick Moynan’s first meal in 6 days after finding their way to Cathedral Lake Lodge!” wrote guest Randall St. Germain in a social media post next to a photo of the couple speaking to curious onlookers.
Attempts by the National Post to contact Carmody and Moynan were unsuccessful, with intermediaries reporting the pair — who were on their way back home to North Bay, Ont., on Monday — were feeling “hounded.”
Frank Caruso, a filmmaker in Toronto who has known Moynan for 45 years, said he can go back to sleeping soundly now that his friend is safe.
“I kept thinking, how far could he possibly walk?” Caruso said.
“But, it’s all good. It ended well, that’s all that matters.”
We’ve never really had anybody go missing like this